Lenovo announces new ThinkPad X220 ultraportable laptop, tablet

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Lenovo announced two updates to its popular X series laptops. The ultraportable ThinkPad X220 laptop and the X220 convertible tablet pack the kind of punch normally found in larger machines. Intended for business professionals on the go, according to Lenovo, these PCs run up to 75 percent faster than ultraportable competitors using low-powered CPUs. In fact, the ThinkPad X220 boasts (up to) an impressive 23-hour battery life and runs up to 20 percent faster thanks to its use of second gen Intel Core i7 processors (Sandy Bridge).

The X220’s 9-cell battery actually lasts 15 hours, but you can get an additional external battery pack to kick it up to the 24-hour notch. The ThinkPad X220 has a new “buttonless” touchpad, a 12.5-inch 1366×768 IPS display, 7GB of DDR3 RAM, up to a 2.7GHz Core i7-2620M CPU, and the choice of Intel SSDs that ranging up to 160GB. The X220 will be available starting in April at $899.

So, how does this compare to the ThinkPad X201? The X201 has a 12.1-inch WXGA + LED display, so the X220 is slightly larger, and it has an HD LED backlit display, which is another plus. The X201 uses a ThinkPad UltraNav TrackPoint and multi-touch touchpad, whereas the new X220 uses the TrackPoint and buttonless touchpad, which is 45 percent larger, which gives extra room for fingers to scroll, highlight and do multitouch gestures.

The X220 about 3 pounds, which is about the same as the X201, but still super light for what you’re getting inside. It comes with three USB 2.0 ports, and an optional USB 3.0 port, which transfers data up to 10 times faster than when using USB 2.0.

As for the tablet, the ThinkPad X220 Tablet offers up to 16 hours of battery life with the new external battery pack, and up to 9 hours with its normal 6-cell battery. For input you can use a pen, your finger, or a keyboard, and it has an outdoor viewable panel with scratch resistant Gorilla Glass, which could be good if you plan on using a pen on the screen a lot. It also has HD graphics, as well as an HD camera, HD microphones, and HD display. Its keyboard also suppresses noise to minimize key clicks from being heard. It uses the new buttonless touchpad, and weighs about 4 pounds. The tablet will start at $1,199 and is also available in April.